News on the March

...They would spend the entire night on each feature, agonizing over every word, seeking the apt phrase, and the results were little gems that were an orna- ment to the paper...

...Unfortunately, the teaching of language has become abominably shoddy...

...This narrow outlook has always been there, even in the heyday of foreign correspon-dents...

...What top graduate would want to spend years in the boondocks writing about municipal affairs or petty local crime...

...new typefaces, flashy section head-ings, boxes, and colored headlines are to make up for the poor contents of the package offered to the customer...

...In North America the union-induced lowering of standards has been further compounded by the fact that the News-paper Guild comprises not only journalists but the entire supporting staff clerks, maintcnance people, janitors, etc...

...With most of the foreign bureaus closed or staffed by local talent, promotion will be to Washington, D.C., where, according to current lore, there is more corruption to be uncovered than in Paris, France...

...The management has to save, and it does so by economizhag on expenditures that helped to make journal- ists well informed and journalism an exciting calling...

...He needs a larger field than Peoria or Carson City, and what better place to un- cover corruption than France of the Third Republic...

...Who could employ them today when the union insists on overtime, pretending that a creative writer is akin to a (unionized) bricklayer, producing so many words per hour...

...Essays, and thus the developing of writing abili-ties, are no longer part of our schools' cur- riculum...

...I had two colleagues, one a legislative reporter, the other a music critic...

...The legislative reporter retired at the time of the union onslaught...

...Hc would stay at home reading and immersing himself in the subject he pro- posed to tackle, meet people who told him interesting things, then come to the office, rattle off an excellent, witty column, and depart, The union, however, did not like it...

...In my days in Europe I was forever encountering young American newspaper men whose foreign career began when, back at home, they uncovered a scandal at the state legislature...

...But management, ob-sessed with saving, has decided it must cater to what is supposed to be the public's taste...

...It is these people in journalism who have lost out...

...Having thus "discovered" the secrets, thc journalist splashes them across the front page and becomes famous overnight...

...Others who grasped the opportunity mastered the language, caught up on history and politics, and became gifted interpreters of contemporary events...

...When a journalist becomes tired of this self-abuse, be goes into public relations, where both the hours and the perks are better, and there is no union to make life miserable...

...Indeed, many of them would be better employed by sell- ing ties and socks, or lingerie...

...So the brightest and the best went elsewhere, as they had done in the United States, where for many years there was a rule that nobody could become a reporter on a major paper without first serving as a copy boy...

...Teachers consider grammar to be of no importance, while spelling is thought to be a mark of class distinction that has to be eliminated...

...Let me illustrate what was done by the union levellers to this last refuge of non- conformists...

...I have heard a "policy director" of a large newspaper chain say that while he himself was interested in foreign affairs, the public did not want it...

...Or else he is lucky to find on the back stairs of his office a bundle of secrets for which the KGB would have given its eyeteeth, and which had been dropped there by a civil servant who, disagreeing with government policy, undertook affir-mative action...

...He is now looking for another venue...

...Whereupon he closed down the chain's foreign bureaus and replaced foreign correspondents' re-ports with syndicated columns on medi-cine, food, and gossip...

...There is no place in modern journalism for the bright boy who once was sent to Europe or the Far East...

...But they are not in journalism because it has become a dead-end employment, having lost its luster and the lure of adven- ture...

...Meanwhile, the public is left blissfully unaware of what Soviet naval bases in southern Africa, or the galloping price of gold, will soon do to all of us...

...Because television is supposed to be the great competitor, management has readily agreed to lower newspaper standards to match those of television, and to revert to the parish-pump emphasis that once in-fi)rmed most North American papers...

...Then the unions stepped in and decreed that nobody could be hired for a Fleet Street paper unless he first spent a given time on a provincial newspaper...

...Students absorb language by listening to television rather than by read- ing books...

...Academic life is both more lucrative and more comfortable, as is civil service or public relations...

...He must have two basic gifts: a skill in handling the language and an insatiable curiosity about public affairs...

...Newspapers are supposed to lead public opinion and their management should be different from that engaged in merchan- dizing footwear...

...Results of readership surveys that produce the most bizarre views are con-tinuously pressed upon editors...

...Students who reach university level should have mas-tered their mother tongue...

...They must inform as much the writer whose main interest centers on the affairs of his hometown as one who must digest and report the intricate details of SALT strategy...

...Today there are few individualists and ec-centrics-and few creative writers--left in the newsrooms or editorial offices...

...Of course there are individuals who write well, can master a subject, and have a facility for learning...

...The crowd puts in its hours and behaves like clerks in a department store...

...Instead, they are offered remedial courses in basic English...

...The boy, the manage- ment bigwigs would say, has great poten- tial...

...Both were excellent although slow writers...

...Some of these youngsters re-mained in Paris, Rome, or Madrid for years, never learning the language and for- ever acting as if they were operating in a larger, foreign-speaking Springfield...

...Once in Washing- ton, the journalist becomes enmeshed in a whirl of cocktail parties staged for the press, where those present exchange gossip with their colleagues, the gossip to be then peddlcd as news...

...Since vast sums of money have to go to pay overtime and all kinds of union-invented benefits, there is no money left for travel, or for reasonable e>.pense accounts that enable journalists to meet important people at their own level...

...Here the blame must be laid squarely on unions...

...The union bosses insisted that he, too, put in seven hours in the office like everybody else...

...All these are treated on the same level as journalists and enjoy high income secured for them by the Guild This in turn has made newspaper publishing a very expen- sive proposition...

...What readers want are recipes and medical stories...

...And when a Gallup Poll comes up with a report that only 7 percent of the United States population chose international issues as the nation's most important problems, or that one-third of the'popula- tion does not know that China has a Com- munist regime, one can see clear evidence of the betrayal perpetrated upon democ-racy by those who manage our journalism...

...Both are innate traits that can be developed and greatly improved by proper education, but they cannot be taught...

...Packaging has become the substitute for serious con-tent...

...It was a practice in Fleet Street for the great British national newspapers m send recruiting teams to Oxford, Cam-bridge, anti other reputable universities, seek out people about to graduate with first-class honors, and if they were suit-able offer them interesting positions...

...journalism used to be a profes.•uality stun of individualists, even eccentrics...

...Thus, despite the insistence on journal-ism being a "craft," a lack of knowledge of the writer's main tool--language--does not seem to be any great impediment when journalists are hired...

...It was an in-genious way to lower standards and get rid of the high fliers...

...The music critic has gone into public relations...

...He becomes one of the "investi- gative reporters," and can look forward to TV and book contracts and a high regard from his peers...

...A third colleague was exactly the oppo- site...

...FHI- AMERICAN SPECTATOR .JANUARY 1980...